How did we get here?
Were there signs that we missed?
Thinking about how such a stable democracy has deteriorated so quickly, and I have my own thoughts on how we got to where we are. We went from mere oscillations of left/right pivoting, but still well within the democratic framework, to outright existential danger in less than 40 years. So how did this happen? Let’s go back about 40 years to a middling actor with great charisma who became President. We’ll start with the Gipper.
1. Ronald Reagan: The man who turned the GOP into a messianic cult.
The man himself wasn’t destabilizing. It was his followers. That’s the moment we all should’ve realized the GOP was “cult-y.” We were fortunate that his messages weren’t any more malignant than “if you’re falling behind, it’s your own fault.” But even my father—a very smart man—fell for it. Talking with him, he’d tell me Reagan saved the economy from disastrous 20% interest rates and the awful malaise of the 70s. I’d tell him that, no, it was actually Paul Volker (Fed chairman, nominated by Jimmy Carter) who saved the economy with his poison pill approach to reigning in inflation. He wasn’t going to hear it. Reagan saved America. End of discussion.
2. Rush Limbaugh: The man who could message to millions every day.
Rush (a former oldies disc jockey—and actually a pretty decent one) rode this disdain for government into an extremely lucrative career. He made just gobs of money. And every radio station I listened to at the time had at least one deejay trying to emulate his success—thinking they, too, could do a night-time talk show. Pretty sure they all—every single one of them—failed (although one eventually became the Texas Lt. Governor). They didn’t have Rush’s charisma or wit. Say what you want about the guy, he had a great voice for radio and a sharp mind to match his anger. We started seeing B-grade emulators, like G. Gordon Liddy, Mark Levin, and Michael Savage (who seemed more small-time hopefuls looking for a lifestyle payday than anything truly ground-shaking). Nowadays, we have hosts from shows like KPRC radio out of Houston who simply don’t have the intellect and presence (and voice) to match what Limbaugh was feeding his listeners every weekday. Honestly, I listen to these shows from time to time and it often sounds more to me like genocidal Rwandan radio than the United State of America. Shame on KPRC. What an ignominious way to make money. But let’s continue….
3. Newt Gingrich: The man who turned the House of Representatives into a Jerry Springer episode.
In my opinion, nobody was more of a destructive force for American politics than fucking Newt. If you detest the Jim Jordans of today’s politics, Newt created the script from which they all read. There’s just too much to go into here about this guy. His personal life. His book. How he mutilated the extreme seriousness of Presidential impeachment to be used as a PR stunt. He orchestrated a government shutdown over agenda items like ending the Federal Student Loan Program and Pell Grants as they existed (fortunately, President Clinton held firm and won). In fact, just about everything today that makes me sick about American politics has Newt’s fat little greasy fingerprints all over it. Even today, he is spewing thinly veiled threats that attack at the very heart of legislative oversight. Indeed, ask me the single worst American politician to have lived in my lifetime, and Newt Fucking Gingrich would be my answer.
4. Fox News: 24-Hour Hate Cycle.
If the above were busted load-bearing beams in your home, Fox News was a toxic black mold outbreak colliding with a massive termite infestation. The network reached far more people than Rush, and their business model was pure adrenaline. And adrenaline is addictive. Mix in some “War on Christmas,” “you’re under attack” and Obama’s “terrorist fist-jab” and you have the makings of a state propaganda network that might make Silvio Berlusconi envious. Formed in the mid-90s around the time Newt was defiling the House, we saw a model of hate-for-profit that we hadn’t seen in the mainstream before. Jesus, this guy was their top host for well over a decade. So now we have hate and fear being spun in a 24 hour news cycle. No longer just a few hours every weekday during lunch. And this is where the downward spiral starts to pick up steam.
5. The Tea Party: White Backlash.
On the morning of February 19, 2009, soon after Barack Obama took office and in the middle of an absolutely terrifying financial meltdown that saw major firms disintegrate right before our eyes—the result of a Bush era program to get as many people into homes as possible—Rick Santelli, from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, delivered a rant against a program to bail out homeowners who were victimized by a malicious mortgage scheme. That scheme was essentially to encourage people to buy homes they couldn’t otherwise afford, then bundle that bad loan with seemingly good loans into an instrument with a false risk assessment that could then be bought and sold. So what difference did it make if the buyer didn’t meet the lender’s criteria for a specific home loan? The risk is diluted by the good loans. Unfortunately, the credit agencies assigned (corruptly) top-shelf credit ratings to these instruments. This was a problem. Some entities, such as public pensions, are required to invest in AAA asset groups, and because these hideous instruments were being given AAA ratings, pension programs were buying them up. What made Santelli’s rant so ugly was that he seemed to be blaming the unsophisticated buyer (many were first-timers) and not the highly sophisticated lender. This gave rise almost overnight to the Tea Party movement—a true force in American politics. And while some, like Santelli, were angry about taxpayers paying for the bad decisions of uninformed buyers, a lot more saw the movement as a vehicle to express their anger, presumably at our nation’s first black President. The rallies were almost uniformly white and rather unhinged by the standards of the time. It led to the Tea Party caucus, a voting bloc in Congress that effectively stopped any attempt to legislate by Democrats and President Obama. They threatened (and sometimes achieved) government shutdowns, while its leader, congresswoman Michelle Bachman from Minnesota, later ran for President. Now you had 24-hour Hate News and angry, activated conservatives morphing into something more radical and dangerous. It was a common site to see activists at Tea Party rallies carrying semi-automatic assault rifles over their shoulders as not-so-thinly-veiled threats to an administration for which they didn’t vote. And then came that guy….
6. Donald Trump: The One True Messiah, or the Kwisatz Haderasshole.
It would be false to attribute the Obama Birth Certificate Conspiracy (or “birtherism”) solely to Trump. It actually goes back to Hillary Clinton’s 08 campaign advisor, Mark Penn, in a strategy memo, citing a “lack of American roots.” He would later appear on Fox News as an aggressive critic of Obama (which doesn’t speak very well of the former First Lady’s judgement—at least when it comes to campaigns and who should lead them). But Hillary, to her credit, didn’t really push this ugly idea. It sure did appeal to conspiracy whore Donald Trump, though. From birtherism and his appearances on Fox News, he had reinvented himself. Through his many iterations, he went from political aspirant to gambling boss to wannabe sports mogul to train-wreck-but-can’t-turn-away tv celebrity back to political aspirant. My mother, in fact, didn’t know much about him, but quickly fell victim to his raw, rather unfiltered aggression. The day he came down that escalator and announced, I swear her tone was almost euphoric.
It’s always a bad idea to dismiss dangerous people as insignificant jokes, as Huffington Post did in early 2015. At the time, I remembered finding it offensive and not real journalism (and actually, that was the moment I cold-turkey stopped reading HuffPost). They issued a sort of mea culpa later that year.
Donald Trump was dangerous in a Huey Long/Father Coughlin kind of way. He talked like the leader of the mean-but-kinda-cool-kid group from high school that you sort of wanted to belong to but also really hated. Uneducated white men found this messaging appealing—maybe he reminded them of their glory days of beating up disaffected kids in Metallica tees. “Knock the crap out of them.” I can’t say why uneducated white women went for him. They were mothers. Surely, they knew he wasn’t a good role model for their little boys, and surely they didn’t want their little girls being victimized by guys like him.
But something had changed.
Now, character didn’t matter to the Republican. No more room for good guys like Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. It just wasn’t enough to feed their 24-hour adrenaline addiction. Nice guys were boring. How you gonna keep ‘em on the farm once they’ve heard Donald Trump humiliate Jeb Bush?
Trump gave us hints. And those hints turned into brazen “fuck you, come get me” style threats. Refusing to condemn David Duke, claiming he knew nothing about him, threatening violence at his rallies, his attendees punching protesters, minimizing the motivations of white nationalists at a rally where a protestor was murdered, asking Russia to illegally attack his opponent, siding with Putin over his own intelligence agencies, hosting the Russian ambassador and Secretary of State by kicking out US media but allowing Russian media to remain, secret meetings with Putin, publicly kicking around the “interesting idea” of extraditing former ambassador Mike McFaul to Russia for interrogation (knowing Putin absolutely hates McFaul), incredibly disturbing snatch and grabs of protestors, unidentified police forces, and so many more examples. Just too many examples.
And this doesn’t really touch on his approach to covid, which he saw as a PR nightmare and not the incredible public health crisis that was killing hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens in a very short period of time. One must be willing to sacrifice one’s self for the greater good, especially if that greater good is maximizing your messiah’s re-election chances. If you don’t acknowledge it, it simply doesn’t exist. “One day—it’s like a miracle—it doesn’t exist.”
Or maybe it was just killing the right kind of people….
So where are we right now? Did Donald Trump cause this?
Well, yes and no.
Ronald Reagan turned them into cult of personality seekers. Rush Limbaugh activated them. Newt Gingrich codified it into government spaces. Fox News fed their addiction. The Tea Party gave them their first taste of political power.
But Donald Trump was the shameless narcissistic personality that was required to lead them to the promised land. That role had very specific traits required of it. And Donald met every one of them.
The biggest mistake we can make is thinking this will break. This is addiction. This is QAnon as entertainment, even when you, the follower, suspects its bullshit. This is threatening civil war because it’s fun. This is trying to invalidate actual elections. It’s stacking the Supreme Court with ideologues. This is dehumanizing the other side so you can commit acts of violence with a clear conscience. We are in an incredibly precarious state right now.
Elections in the foreseeable future will not be about policy. Or at least they should NOT be.
They must be about one thing and one thing only: Making sure anti-democratic right-wing candidates lose every election they enter. Only when the party is purged of this evil should we go back to issue-based voting.
So even if you think Biden has been a failure—if you think he’s too far left or too centrist or too weak or too old—just remind yourself that everyone with a D next to their names on ballots are the pro-Democracy candidates. That’s it. That’s the game now.
It sounds cliche, but it’s real. Vote like your children’s futures depend on it, because unless you want them growing up in an extremely unstable, unsafe, miserable, violent, chaotic world, it absolutely does.